Big Money Upends a Festival

South by Southwest Festival Starts to Feel Corporate

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The Music of SXSW

The Music of SXSW

CreditBen Sklar for The New York Times

AUSTIN, Tex. — I’ve had it with hashtags.

Sponsor-suggested hashtags were all over the place at the 28th annual South by Southwest Music festival here: on walls, on stages, on billboards, on vehicles, on T-shirts, on stickers, on cellphone apps. A newcomer to SXSW might well believe that the whole thing was created to induce social-media marketing.

It wasn’t. Somewhere within the big, loud, heavily branded party that thronged the streets of downtown Austin from Tuesday through Saturday — and that included a grim accident when a drunken driver crashed through a barricade, killing two people and injuring many more — there was still the core of what SXSW has done since 1987: provide exposure for striving musicians, many of them independent.

Those musicians, sleeping on couches and sometimes lugging their own equipment to play three or four brief sets a day, still make SXSW’s own brand connote discovery and integrity — the reason Jimmy Kimmel broadcast his late-night talk show from Austin during the festival, and the reason snack-food and cellphone companies plastered their logos and faux-viral hashtags all over the place. Yet those baby bands (and rappers, solo songwriters, D.J.s and other musical configurations) faced widespread and well-capitalized competition for the attention they were hoping to get at SXSW. Anyone willing to jump through sponsors’ hoops — to install an app, tweet a hashtag or get a branded haircut and post it online — could spend SXSW seeing million-selling acts like Jay Z and Kanye West, who performed together, and ignore the up-and-comers completely.

It was, in a way, the income-inequality debate carried into the realm of attention: The tiny fraction of a percentage of performers who have made it big were grabbing even more exposure away from the struggling majority.

For hip-hop fans, SXSW 2014 was a corporate-financed cornucopia; in the course of the festival, mostly in sponsored settings, there were also performances by Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Ludacris, 2 Chainz, B.o.B., ASAP Rocky and many other top rappers, often on big outdoor stages with their music booming for blocks. As SXSW becomes more of a corporate platform, hip-hop is well-positioned to exploit it. Most hip-hop acts and posses are, proudly and ostentatiously, their own brands, touting their own success and coining their own slogans.

But Lady Gaga was the most prominent face of this year’s festival; she was a keynote speaker, in a softball onstage interview with John Norris of Fuse Music News. Her concert at Stubb’s BBQ was not open to those attending the official SXSW conference; to attend the show, which was also (like many SXSW events) live streamed, fans were required to complete (and tweet) a corporate-approved stunt, and the sponsor had its name in lights onstage behind her as she performed, although she announced that she wouldn’t play by the rules. Perhaps she was acting out some level of self-loathing as she made her entrance trussed to a barbecue spit and later, during the angry song “Swine,” had the performance artist Millie Brown vomit green and black paint on her.

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Performers at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., included Hyuna.Credit
Ben Sklar for The New York Times

During the keynote interview, Lady Gaga defended her acceptance of corporate support. “Without sponsorships, without these companies coming together to help us, we won’t have any more artists in Austin,” she said. “We won’t have any festivals, because record labels don’t have any” emphatic word deleted “money.” Which was, of course, nonsense; her “us” is the tiny sliver of established, high-maintenance hit makers. Self-made bands have been coming to SXSW for nearly three decades without labels or sponsors. The best thing Lady Gaga could have done for struggling bands would be not to steal the spotlight from them.

So I spent my SXSW away from most of the million sellers, though not all of them. I couldn’t resist seeing Foxboro Hot Tubs, the alter egos of Green Day, who have their own repertory of punk-revved, British-Invasion-tinged songs, and who slammed their way through sets for club-size audiences, clowning and popping confetti guns. Damon Albarn, the singer and songwriter behind million-selling albums by Blur and Gorillaz, previewed under his own name an album due in April, “Everyday Robots,” a set of mostly somber, slow-chugging songs that (like many of those attending SXSW) ponder the ubiquity of technology.

There was a science-fiction streak at SXSW, with performances like the one by St. Vincent: the songwriter Annie Clark and her band, playing her intricate, artifice-loving, often funky (in a twisted way) songs full of buzzy guitar effects and live virtuosity. Synthesizers, samplers and computers were the foundations both for groups slinging relentlessly repeated hooks — hoping to be ad jingles someday? — and for those who were more unpredictable.

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Chet Faker, an Australian singer and producer, made his songs assemble and disassemble on the spot, triggering beats and playing keyboards as he crooned romantic woes. Sohn, from England, set his melancholy voice over tracks that built monumental peaks; Sylvan Esso, a duo from North Carolina, could sound like deliberately primitive 1970s electro in one song and glitchy, abstract techno in another behind Amelia Meath’s teasing voice. Forest Swords, the duo led by the English producer Matthew Barnes, kept its distance from pop; its somber, deliberate instrumentals wandered from the backbeat of dub reggae toward more exotic realms.

At SXSW, rock bands seem like less of an endangered species than they are on the pop charts. Some were unabashed throwbacks, like the Strypes, a young band that happily bashed through pugnacious, mid-1960s-style garage-rock songs about unglamorous lives. There were also bands that were steeped in the drone and reverb of psychedelia but kept song structures in mind. Quilt, from Boston, brought four-part vocal harmonies to their lustrous haze; Temples, from England, had crisp British Invasion riffs amid their guitar swirl. The Wytches, from England, added punky aggression amid the fuzztone, while the songs of Boogarins, from Brazil, looked back to their own late-1960s heritage with some of the exuberant convolutions of 1960s tropicália.

Cherry Glazerr, from Los Angeles, drew more on punk than psychedelia, in songs that can snarl while staying calm; it’s hard to resist a chorus that goes, “I am irate.” Speedy Ortiz, led by the songwriter and guitarist Sadie Dupuis, cranked up the angular chords of 1980s indie-rock with the distortion of grunge as she navigated both melodies and relationships that could be choppy. Bonzie, a songwriter and bandleader from Chicago, was gentler — often folky at first — but just as steely in songs that charted trust and tension. Phox, from Madison, Wis., put buoyant African and Caribbean grooves behind sometimes moody reflections.

There were quieter possibilities, too. Arc Iris — with its leader, Jocie Adams, in a gold-lamé catsuit — had songs that seesawed between the elfin delicacy of Joanna Newsom and some brassy raucousness. Agnes Obel played quiet, haunted waltzes, with a violinist and cellist using loops to multiply themselves into a string section.

Bands like those can still make something of the exposure SXSW offers — if not in real time, then in the endless online documentation, the amateur YouTube videos and radio-station recording sessions that now are as much a part of SXSW as the showcases in Austin. With any luck, and no corporate support necessary, listeners can hashtag those.

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2014, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Big Money Upends a Festival. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe